Global Research

If, on Martin Luther King’s birthday and U.S. national holiday, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil could have quoted from King’s mainstream media covered up 1967 New York sermon ‘Beyond Vietnam – a Time to Break Silence,’ which condemned his government’s atrocity wars to protect predatory investments, he might have started by quoting what King said about Latin America.

King bitterly lamented:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit… we will find ourselves organizing Clergy and Laymen Concerned committees concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia… During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter- revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.[1])

Lula would have shocked listeners in Brazil and abroad who only think of Rev. King as a great black civil rights leader. Rev. Martin Luther King, today the only American celebrity with the distinction of a national weekend holiday to honour his birthday, in 1967, made bold print headlines in newspapers across the world of King loudly denouncing his very own U.S. government.

King Calls U.S.”Greatest Purveyor of Violence in World”[1]

“So far we may have killed a million of them—mostly children… children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.”[1]

In his sermon (which was vilified in the U.S. press), King did not speak to his government, but to all Americans, and agonised over his not having spoken up sooner. Martin Luther King had cried out

“A time comes when silence is betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” [1]

So what would Rev. King have said to or about Americans since his assassination continuing to bring massive death and destruction to so many more small countries and the use of dire health crippling sanctions against smaller countries seeking social reforms of the U.S. imposed poverty causing private corporate capitalist exploitation of their indigenous resources, the recent and ongoing wars on the citizens and their children in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. provided for and defended genocide in Gaza and murderous military occupation of all Palestinians?

President Lula has echoed Martin Luther King’s depiction of America as most violent in his call for U.S. President Biden to end the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, while US State Dept says “not seeing acts of genocide” in Gaza.[2] Brazilian President Lula, the leader of the Workers Party, announced that Brazil would support genocide charges being leveled against Israel.[3]

If some salient voice of, say a president of a sizeable nation like Brazil, which might be difficult for CIA-overseen U.S. and Western media[4] to ignore, could point out to the criminal media mesmerised world that the government of the United States of America was condemned as the most violent in the world by America’s own idol, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, this writer believes it would be a sensation, and a most difficult moment for the U.S. government and America’s wars supporting mainstream media – which has for 57 years totally suppressed all mention of King’s condemnation of his government’s wars to protect predatory investments. Ending or a least reducing CIA-overseen Western media[4] outlets would contribute immensely to the world (and the U.S.) being released from the awful life taking grip of wars promoting U.S. grand corporate private capitalism.

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Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer.

Notes

1. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

2. US ‘not seeing acts of genocide’ in Gaza, State Dept says, Reuters, Jan. 3, 2024

3. Payday Report, Jan. 10,2024

4.  “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Times